Saturday, August 3, 2013

I was doing a little cleanup on the blog tonight when I came across a couple of things I knew were coming but still were a punch in the gut: the domains for The Pink Pigtail Inn and TankingTips.com were gone.*

Going through the list, Voss' Sword and Board and Cynwise's Posterous Field Notes have also vanished into the same ether that claimed Tam's Righteous Orbs and Lara's Root and Branch. Still, the PPI especially was the great watering hole that not only had Larisa's posts, but also had the monster mess of a blogroll that people could use as a master reading list. I know I used to use PPI to find new blogs to read, and I could trace a big spike in PC's readership to the week when Larisa added us to her blogroll. Even up to a year after Larisa stopped posting at PPI, we'd see more people following a link from there to our blog than just about anywhere else.

Change is the only constant in the blogging world. Keeping up a blogging schedule is not an easy task, and real life has a way of interfering with both blogging and game playing. When we started PC almost four years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. If I did, I might not have committed to it. Yet at the same time, I'd not have traded the experience for the world. I've met fellow bloggers around the world whom I'm happy to call friend, and the schedule of writing a blog has pushed me (and my writing) in directions I didn't think I could go.** the MMO blogosphere can be sniping and backbiting at times, but we all have the same interest at heart: a love of the weird wonderful worlds that inhabit a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG.

This blog, while ostensibly about "all sorts of games", really began as a WoW blog. And it remained that way for well over two years, with occasional forays into other MMOs. However, as I've moved from one dominant MMO (WoW) to several MMOs, the blog's feel has changed to reflect that. I suppose that going forward you can expect more change, but what it will entail I don't really know.

I'm not the gamer that some people are; I don't have the experience in electronic gaming that Spinks has, for example, or the endgame experience that many other MMO bloggers have. While I realize his hiatus was for medical reasons I still miss Cynwise's PvP posts, because compared to the master I'm merely playing at PvP. There are others who write great fiction, like Rades or Akabeko (The Red Cow), and many others whose humor and wit bring cheer to an otherwise dreary morning reading work e-mail. However, it is the thoughtful blog posts, the ones where people bare a little of their souls, that I cherish the most. It's the equivalent of sitting out on a porch with a beer or two, shooting the bull, while the sun goes down and the fireflies dance in the yard.

But I hope that as the blogosphere changes, one thing remains constant: the camaraderie of the bloggers themselves.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a beer that's getting warm.

*The Pink Pigtail Inn goes to another blog entirely now, and the domain for TankingTips.com has completely vanished.

**Now, if that will only translate into getting a novel written to completion....

10 comments:

That is indeed sad. :( I don't mind so much when people stop writing (it is after all understandable) but when everything they've ever put out just... disappears, that's very sad. If I had a penny for every time I wanted to go back and re-read an old Righteous Orbs post...

I knew Tam really didn't care about posterity very much, but when Righteous Orbs vanished I really missed his posts. He had that incisive wit that really cut through the crap; I'll never forget his post about raiding with a raid leader who was half his age.

You'll have to excuse me for replying to something from many months ago, but I found out today that the PPI actually still exists and was reminded of this post! It's only the old domain name that's gone, the actual site is still up under pinkpigtailinn.blogspot.com!

The thing is, people had used the old domain for so long that when it disappeared it dropped off of everyone's radar. If I went back over the stats, I could probably find out exactly when it happened, because we still got hits from PPI even after Larisa had retired.

Although, hmm, PC isn't on the list of her links anymore. I wonder if that was an intentional trimming, or whether this is an older list. There's a lot of ancient blogs that no longer update on this list, so I suspect it's an older list.

I just had the same thing happen. Although he posted that he would no longer be blogging, Mortigan The Warlock left his very amusing blog up but on my recent visit to reread my favorites it was gone. Gone is so much sadder.

I am here for the same reason, I have no wisdom to share, I don't write fiction I just want to hang out on that porch and enjoy the company.

This is a weirdly sad realization! To be honest, most of my sadness is when the blogs stop updating, because I rarely go back and reread old posts. But the idea that any links to them, any chance to introduce someone "the blog is no longer updated, but it's worth a read anyway" is now impossible...That makes me kind of sad!